


nevermore to be alone

by Murf1307



Category: X-Men (Movies), X-Men (Movieverse), X-Men - All Media Types, X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) - Fandom, X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Compliant, Darwin is Alive, Dreams, First Kiss, Love Letters, M/M, Mention of Past Sex Work, Misunderstandings, Reunions, Temporary Amnesia, Unsent letters, Vietnam War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-15
Updated: 2016-01-15
Packaged: 2018-05-14 04:11:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5729077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Murf1307/pseuds/Murf1307
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Armando comes back while Alex is in Vietnam.  Amnesia and misunderstandings complicate the reunion process.</p>
            </blockquote>





	nevermore to be alone

**Author's Note:**

> this was written for the tumblr prompt, "alex/darwin -- 'i'm sorry, but who are you?'" and is heavily inspired by the dixie chicks song 'travelin' soldier'

The draft notice came, and there was part of Alex that was all-too-prepared for it.There were only so many things he could do, and fighting was one of them, so why _shouldn’t_ he be a soldier?He likely would’ve wound up in prison or in the army _anyway_ , if Charles and Erik had never come for him — he knew how these things worked.

Charles told him he didn’t need to go, he could stay, and they’d find a way to make it work, but that was bullshit.Charles just didn’t like to lose control over the people who he still had left.

For that, Alex was glad to be gone.25 years old, and he was glad to be stepping into a war zone.

God, that was fucked.But it was all he had.

They were all going to die someday, anyway, for what they all were.He might as well die fighting.

For now, though, he was waiting for the bus to come, and he wandered into a diner in Salem Center, green fatigues and duffel.Private Summers, that was who he was going to be. 

Funny how Charles getting Alex’s records erased made him eligible for this, really — the prostitution charge probably would’ve saved him, now that he thought about it, sitting in that vinyl seat, the menu in front of him. 

Desperate teenaged shirtlifter that he’d been, it could’ve saved him.Instead, his mutation meant that he was sitting here, trying to decide whether it was worth having something sweet before he left.

He looked up, eyes coasting around the diner, but there was nothing, really, to see.He looked down again, sighing softly, and thought about it.

* * *

Armando didn’t remember much between 1962 and 1969.  He just woke up one day in Virginia, naked as the day he was born.  Last thing he remembered was being in New York, in his cab, and after that, just flashes of pain in bright, red, throbbing light.

So he made his way back up to New York.Instinct pushed him away from taxis, and upstate, where he could settle down for a while.

He bussed tables in a diner for a few months before they let him start waiting them.Today, everything seemed the same as it always had, until he came out from the back, carrying some milkshakes to a blonde teenaged girl and her skinny brunet boyfriend, and saw another blond, way over on the other side of the diner. 

Something shifted in his gut.A soldier.Newly drafted, if the way he hunched over the table said anything. 

But…there was something more than that.He didn’t know what, and he paused, hand curling around the edge of the diner’s counter as he looked at him.

Biting the inside of his cheek, he shook it off and when back into the back when one of the cooks called his name.

When he came back out, the soldier was gone.

He wasn’t sure why he was disappointed — after all, what would’ve happened if he’d said something?Just that white boy saying, maybe gently, maybe not, “I’m sorry, but who are you?”

Sighing, he wiped down the bar, and got back to work.

* * *

_6/19/1970  
_ _Darwin —_

_This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever done.I mean, it’s not like I can even send you these.You’re dead.You’ve been dead for almost ten years._

_But I’ve got nobody else I really want to write to.Charles has probably written me off the way he writes off anyone who does something he tells them not to, and Hank…well.The less said about what happened there, the better, I guess._

_Vietnam’s hot.Humid.I’m glad you’re not here — it’d be harder to do this, if you were._

_I guess I might as well write it out.Nobody’s ever gonna read it._

_I miss you._

_— Pvt. A. Summers_

* * *

Three weeks later, Armando started to dream.  It’s strange, a flickering thing, and it unsettled him.

It’s not that he didn’t normally dream — he did, like anyone else.

But these dreams, like that soldier, were different.Louder, somehow, more immediate.Hooked in with that brief memory of dying, red and white overload in his throat, behind his eyes.

He couldn’t see, in the dream, but he could touch, and he did, his hand on someone’s chest and a sense of looming dread.Dread, and warmth.

When he woke up, he didn’t know what to do with it.

So he tried to forget about it.

* * *

_11/11/1971  
_ _Darwin —_

_They say the war might be over soon.They also say it’s gonna go on forever.So, there’s that._

_It’s…I can’t describe it.Don’t want to.You’re dead enough to avoid it, and, well, that was a war, too, wasn’t it?Shaw’s war.It feels like that, only all the time._

_Miss you.Don’t know if I’ll have the chance to sit down and write to you again for a while.The V.C. are everywhere lately, and given the way my squad’s put together, we’re usually in the thick of it._

_— Pvt. A. Summers_

* * *

The dreams didn’t stop.  Armando would wake up, gasping, chest hot with the memory of dying, and realize that — these weren’t dreams.  They were memories.

He didn’t know how or why, but one night, when all he dreamed about was his own damn reflection in the glass of a pinball machine and a low, soft voice saying “Don’t beat yourself up about it, I’ve had a lot of free time,” he woke up crying anyway.

* * *

_7/3/1972  
_ _Darwin —_

_Ten years, huh?Exactly ten years.Fuck._

_Ink’s got a girl at home in Philly, y’know.Spyke’s got a kid.And all I’ve got’s a ten-year-old broken heart._

_I dream about you more often than I dream about the hell I’m living in._

_I love you.I don’t know why, because it’s stupid, but I love you more every year you’re gone._

_I hope, wherever you are, you at least know that._

_— Pvt. A. Summers_

* * *

The memories came back, and made sense, in October of 1972.  All the names came back, and Armando lay back, stunned, as the soldier in the diner and the low, soft voice coalesced into the same person — Alex, Havok, that skittish hotshot who’d trusted him completely.

Alex, who he’d been starting to fall in love with, because how could he not?It had been easy as breathing, easy as touching him — when really, that shouldn’t have come so easy, either.

But it had, and it had killed him, because of course it had.

“Damnit,” he murmured to himself, and got up to searching.

* * *

Finding Alex was a little more difficult than Armando would’ve thought, and he nearly kicked himself when he realized how close he’d been the whole time.

He made his way up to the Xavier mansion one chilly day in December, and knocked on the door.

Hank McCoy answered, eyes widening in shock.“Darwin?!”

“In the flesh,” he said, grinning quietly.“Is Alex around?”

The smile dropped off of Hank’s face so fast it seemed like it was falling.“He got drafted.We haven’t seen him since…god, 1970.”

That lined up, at least, with the soldier he’d seen, the soldier whose presence had started the dreams.

“Well, maybe he’ll come back,” he said, easily.“Mind if I come in?”

It was a nice conversation — Hank wanted to know how he was alive, and he told him he wasn’t sure, but he’d lost his memory for a few years.

Maybe twenty minutes into it, there was a knock on the door.

“Two in one day?” Hank said, raising an eyebrow.“We haven’t had a single visitor in years, and now we get two in one day?Figures.”

Armando followed him to the door, but when it opened, his stomach dropped out of his gut.

A young soldier, an officer by the look of his dress uniform, stood soberly on the front step of the mansion.

“My name is 1st-Lieutenant William Stryker.Is this the correct address for the next of kin of Private Alex Summers?” 

* * *

_2/1/1973  
_ _Darwin —_

_I’m on the ground in the States again.War’s over, I can go home, etc. etc., Raven saved the world._

_I just.I don’t know whether I want to go back to the mansion._

_I know exactly where I’d be if you were alive, though._

_—_ ~~_Pvt._ ~~ _Alex_

* * *

Alex climbed the steps of the mansion on February 14th, 1973, filled with deep misgivings.

On the one hand, he didn’t want to be here, and likely, nothing had changed since he’d left, but on the other, if something had — maybe Charles could help him find Scott.

He knocked on the door.

He was not expecting to see Darwin on the other side of it.

“Alex?” Darwin said, voice soft and eyes wide — like he was looking at a ghost, himself.

Alex stared back at him.“Aren’t — didn’t you — you’re _dead_.”

“So are you, according to the Army,” Darwin said, quickly, tugging him into the house.He still looked like he was struggling to understand the situation.

“What?”

“In December — the day I got back here, finally — there was an officer, he said —“Darwin stopped, looked a him for a long moment, and then yanked him into a hug, practically crushing him to his chest.He was laughing, shaking a little. 

Alex couldn’t help but hug back, burying his face in Darwin’s neck.“I — I wrote you.Letters.I didn’t send ‘em, but — shit, Darwin, how are you even —“

“I don’t know, I don’t know —“

“Doesn’t matter, I don’t care, you’re _here_ ,” Alex cut him off, holding him tighter.

Darwin’s hands settled in the small of his back.“So this is what a miracle feels like, huh?”

“Yeah,” Alex murmured.“Raven got me and my squad out right when the war was ending, saved us from these guys with, like, tranquilizers or whatever.I took the slow way home.”

God, he wished he’d hurried. 

Darwin stepped back a little, hands still on Alex’s waist.“I — it took me years to remember what happened.Woke up in Virginia in ’69, found my way up to New York.I think, I think I saw you, right before you shipped out.”

His voice was full of unspoken self-recrimination, and Alex remembered.

“I — I thought I recognized you, but I thought if I said something —“

“—That I’d think you were crazy, right?”Darwin was smiling, somehow.“I wanted to talk to you, didn’t know why, thought you’d think _I_ was the crazy one.”

There wasn’t anything Alex could do, now, to stop himself from leaning up and kissing him.He’d been through hell, walked into enemy territory with nothing but his mutation and a half-empty pistol, and there were some things that stopped being frightening after that.

Or, at least, the reward outweighed the risk. 

Darwin kissed him back, arms tightening around him again, and Alex kissed him until he couldn’t for lack of air.Vision fuzzy at the edges, he tipped his head against Darwin’s.

“I’ve been wanting to do that for ten years,” he confessed.“Fuck, Darwin, I missed you.”

“I missed you too, hotshot,” Darwin murmured, his smile soft.“Looks like we’ve got some catching up to do.” 

And thank God they had the time, because Alex never wanted to let go of Darwin again.


End file.
